"Stillness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Again the stillness was broken. This time it was by the harsh voice of a black carrion. This too was followed by movement, only the movement had no haste or suggestion of fear. It was simply the heavy flapping of slow-moving wings. Two enormous crows launched themselves upon the air ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... The intense stillness within the house, instead of reassuring me, served as a threat. After my experience of the night, it spoke ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... moment or two of breathless stillness, and then, with a sharp cry of fear, the sleeper ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... clearest, faintest azure bending overhead; in the centre of the aerial landscape the massive walls of the cloister of Pfalzel, gray to the east, purple to the west; silence over all,—a gentle, eager, conscious stillness, diffused through the air like perfume, as if earth and sky were hushing themselves to hear the voice of the river faintly murmuring down ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... been twa o'clock in the mornin' or maybe a little mair, and I was just thinkin' that I wasna tae see onything after a'—and I wasna very sorry neither—when all o' a sudden a soond cam tae my ears clear and distinct through the stillness ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had gone to bed long before. I was so interested that I forgot what I was doing and ran into the hedge so that I nearly came down. There was the noise of the scrape and drag of the machine which must have sounded very loud in the stillness. It startled him, for he looked all round, but he didn't see me, for I was under the hedge. Then suddenly he started running. He ran as if the devil was after him. I saw him squash down his Trilby hat so that it was shapeless. Then he disappeared along ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... it afterwards appeared to have attracted the attention of no one else in the family. Supposing that some article of furniture had accidentally fallen, the noise of which had been rendered more noticeable by the perfect stillness of the night, I pursued my occupation, until I felt disposed for sleep. On the following night, while engaged in the same way, and at the same midnight hour, came the same heavy, sharp, distinct thud upon the floor directly above my head. I was disposed to philosophize on the subject, ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... nearly two hours, there was absolute stillness once more in this miserable house. Bessie had sunk, half fainting, on a chair by the bed, and lay there, her head ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... times. Fine thoughts were never spontaneous with him, never unexpected, never unwaited for,—never, certainly till long after he had got his growth. In fact, some of the happiest passages we have seem to be engraved, letter by letter, instead of being written at once, or launched away into the stillness, like a red-hot thunderbolt. Well do I remember a little incident which occurred in Baltimore, soon after the failure of Pierpont and Lord—and Neal, when we were all dying of sheer inaction, and almost ready to hang ourselves—in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... formation. No city fills a more prominent page in the records of the Middle Ages, or is more enshrined in romance and poetry. It is a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, and yet what comparative stillness reigns over all, solemn and strange especially to the newly arrived traveller. There is no rattling of wheels, no tramp of horses' feet upon the streets; wheels and horses are unknown; only the gondola serves ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... time the whole after-part of the vessel was shrouded in smoke that had been oozing out from the door and windows of the cabin, and which, in consequence of the stillness of the night, was not carried away. Slowly it ascended into the air, and so straight upwards that the edge of the cloud had not yet approached the main-deck—although the whole of the mizen-mast was enveloped by the thick smoke and invisible to its very peak. Most ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... great peace, of which we are so proud, was more like the stillness of stagnant pools than the calm ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... acquiescence, amidst a stillness which, when he surveyed the lowering brows of one party at least of those who were in the church, boded no peaceful termination to this fated day. The father motioned to the messenger to show him the way, and proceeded on his mission, attended ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... is not so much the doctrine of the Divine voice as that of the preliminary stillness, the closure against other voices and the reduction of the mind to a condition in which it can LISTEN, in which it can discern the merest whisper, inaudible when the world, or interest, or ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... he knew that he must be a considerable distance westward of the line of the camp. His training during the winter in holding a line of march helped him now to maintain his course steadily in one direction. The temperature was still dropping rapidly. Over the woods hung a dead stillness, except for the lonely call of an occasional crow or for the scream of the impudent whiskey-jack. But soon even these became silent. As he surmounted each hill top Cameron took his bearings afresh and anxiously scanned the sky for weather signs. In spite of himself there crept over him ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... white little face,' she tremblingly cries, 'It cannot be yours, that white little face; O when did you get those far-seeking eyes? And the stillness in lieu ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... above, and then Miss Letty's voice, a very little voice suited to the dusk and stillness, came ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... sweetly-toned instrument! It is thrown to the air, and in its plaint makes sweet music of its melancholy. Like harmonious spirits chanting in their invisibility, making vocal the very atmosphere, it died away as though going to a great distance, and stillness was in the whole house. He stole gently to the door. There seated was Alice; her elbow on her instrument, and her brow upon her hand. The bell rang for dinner. The repast is over, and a glass of generous wine sent the rose to the cheeks of Alice, but enlivened not her eye. Her heart ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... this only happens once in ten years. Good God, listen!" Like a savage beast the wind seemed to skulk, and to crouch.... It sprang forward and seized the house and shook it. Then it died away, and there was stillness ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... chimney. Alma had been in earnest when she had said she meant to be economical. Her firm will was now set in that direction. Coin after coin was dropped into the chimney, as swallow after swallow sinks into similar quarters when a summer night comes on. The accumulating store lay in secrecy and in stillness, save when Alma now and then made the little house shake as if an earthquake threatened it with destruction, while she listened delightedly to the jingling and rattling within. She wished often that she had asked Nono to make real windows with glass in them, through ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... a stillness on his spirit fell, Before th' unearthly train; For he knew Valhalla's daughters well, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... learned to handle his two heavy clubs in complex curves that seem to you inexplicable, tracing in the air a device as swift and tangled as that woven by a swarm of gossamer flies above a brook, in the sultry stillness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... can have things as definite as you wish; out-doors you will find a continual play of varying color and light. The shadows do not fall where you expect them to. The values are less marked. The stillness of the pose is interfered with by the constant movement of nature. The color is influenced by the diffused color of the atmosphere and the reflected color of the grass, the trees, and the sky. The light does not fall on the face so much as it ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of stone, itself surrounded by a great outer circle of standing stones, thirty in number, like gray sentinels guarding the shrine. In the very heart of the pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and peace, is the inmost sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross, domed with a lofty roof, and adorned with mysterious tracings on the rocks. Shrines like this are found in many lands, whether ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... sound broke the death-like stillness of the room as he sat down, and I noticed that every face within my view was turned away from the prisoner's chair and the old man who sat near it. The tense strain of the moment was broken by the prisoner's counsel, who arose and began a motion for ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... she added, with a glance at him which took in the dust, and the stains of salt-water on his clothes, the fatigue he sought to conceal by a rigid stillness, and the tension that was left by the dangers he had ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... winds from the sea had lulled, and for once the house was utterly quiet—so quiet that the stillness became oppressive. Meanwhile the young girl sat in her bower of luxury, softly humming a favorite air, and very happy in thoughts of her approaching marriage. While deep in her smiling reverie, a stealthy footstep distinctly ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... of her foremothers and let herself drift out on her own troubled waters. Wrapped in the compassionate darkness she was giving way to the luxury of letting the controlled tears rise to her eyes and the sobs that her white throat ached from suppressing all day were echoing on the stillness when a voice came from the little cot by her bed and the General in disheveled nightshirt and rumpled head rose by her pillow and stood with uncertain feet on his ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... night, I again betook myself to the street in which Shunah Shoo lived, but not by the ordinary route. I cautiously approached his house. All was stillness and quiet: no light appeared to be burning in Veenah's room, nor indeed in any other part of the house. I hence concluded that they had now deprived her of light, as well as of pen and ink. I continued ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... which indeed were never high. She said she enjoyed the walk, which she and Lois took in company, Madge having gone with her grandmother and Charity in Mrs. Marx's waggon. The winter evening was falling grey, and the grey was growing dark; and there was something in the dusky stillness, and soft, half-defined lines of the landscape, with the sharp, crisp air, which suited the mood of both ladies. The stars were not visible yet; the western horizon had still a glow left from the sunset; and houses and trees stood like dark solemn ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... the time our pilot came on board, and as we entered the harbour the town lay deep in the stillness of the afternoon. We had cast anchor, and I was reflecting on my next course of action when I heard my name called from under the ship's side. Looking down, I spied a tall, grave gentleman seated in a boat. I replied as well as I could for the noise, and presently ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the life That but an instant off stirred the warm air With murmurs multifarious, and the waves Of great humanity, sunk silenced there, With stillness so supreme, that pulses beat More quickly from the contrast, and the soul Hearkened to listen, humbled and subdued As when the Saviour uttered 'Peace, be still.' The tardy laborer, walled within the town, Brought the uplifted hammer noiseless down, And ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... We made good speed, for the family mule, homeward bound, stepped on briskly under its double burden. Sometimes we kept up with the party, joining in the talk of the good peasants; at others, falling behind to enjoy the stillness of the scene, and abandon ourselves to the contemplation of its ever-varying features. Now we threaded the bank of a mountain torrent far beneath in shade, the depth of which the eye was unable to penetrate as we plunged downwards through the thickets; then, crossing the stream and scrambling ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... nightfall came and the Americans were resting in Calumpit after their two days' hard fighting, the whole district was illuminated for miles around by the flames from the burning villages and groups of huts, whilst the snapping of the burning bamboos echoed through the stillness like volleys ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the spirit of slumber had not yet taken possession of the place. But these soon ceased. The wind moved the tall laburnums in the lane without a sound, and the murmur of running water alone broke the stillness, as the gurgle of the burn, and the rush of the distant mill-dam met and mingled in the air of the ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... that four-hundred foot gash in the earth; the sinking moon lightened only a strip along the east wall, near the top; lower down, smoke mingling with the natural gloom cast an impenetrable veil from bank to bank; not a breath of air stirred the tomblike stillness. Directly in front of us a horse coughed. We dropped on all fours, listened a moment, then crept forward. Without warning, we found ourselves foul of a picket-line, and the vague forms of grazing horses loomed close by. Piegan halted ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... But the stillness remained unbroken and the shadows deepened, until he saw that the night was fully come, and he could move about without danger of being fired upon from a distance. The moon was late in rising, so that the gloom was ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... Badger, or else Badger got to know of it somehow, so I came straight off here, through the Wild Wood and the snow! My! it was fine, coming through the snow as the red sun was rising and showing against the black tree-trunks! As you went along in the stillness, every now and then masses of snow slid off the branches suddenly with a flop! making you jump and run for cover. Snow-castles and snow-caverns had sprung up out of nowhere in the night—and snow bridges, terraces, ramparts—I ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... now side by side, now, where the way was narrow, one before the other. The blue clouded over, there sprang a wind. The trees bent and shook, the deep glen grew gray and dark. That wind died and there was a breathless stillness, heated and heavy. Each heard the other's ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... opened, doors all but slammed, vague whisperings and drawn breaths had hovered impalpably about the whole place; but now all was utterly quiet. His own regular footfall alone disturbed the unnatural stillness of ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... intense stillness that followed the noise that Bert Dodge made in shifting his feet on the floor sounded loud, indeed. Anstey was a trifle paler than usual, but he was working under an intense conviction, and the grit and dash of his Revolutionary forbears was quite sufficient to carry him on ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... brought a song to the great Springfield assembly. He sang it when the people were in a receptive mood. It voiced their hearts, and its influence was electric. As he rose before the assembly on that August day under the prairie sun, and sang: "Hark! hark! a signal-gun is heard," a stillness came over the great sea of the people. The figures of the first verse filled the imagination, but the ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... during their absence. McMillan had also been notified to support the movement of Grover's brigades. Emory himself was up and dressed, the horses of his staff were saddled, and his own horses were being saddled, when from the left a startling sound broke the stillness of the morning air. ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... the pit! Bushes with twisted and fantastic arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting wail and groan of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... had not gone at once to Lockhaven; they spent a fortnight in wandering about through the mountains on horseback. The sweet June weather, the crystal freshness of the air, and the melodious stillness of the woods and fields wrapped those first heavenly days of entire possession in a mist of joy. Afterwards, John Ward felt that it had blinded the eyes of his soul, and drifted between him and his highest duty; he had not been able to turn away from the gladness of living in ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... weary, and towards midnight only a few intermittent notes broke the stillness. Soon all was silent as the grave, save for the occasional cry of some animal prowling in search of food upon ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... at length out into the darkness of the barrack-square stalks the trumpeter on duty, and the shrill notes of the reveille echo through the stillness of the yet dark night. On an ordinary morning the reveille is practically negatived, and nobody thinks of stirring from between the blankets till the "warning" sounds quarter of an hour before the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... The stillness was broken by a piercing scream that caused every head to bob up, and the blankets to be ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... women, like waggon-tilts, their cotton gowns and checked shawls, mixed with the carters' smockfrocks; for they, too, entered into the hiring. Among the rest, at the corner of the pavement, stood an old shepherd, who attracted the eyes of Lucetta and Farfrae by his stillness. He was evidently a chastened man. The battle of life had been a sharp one with him, for, to begin with, he was a man of small frame. He was now so bowed by hard work and years that, approaching from behind, a person could hardly see his head. He had planted the stem of his crook ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... again the horizon. How sweet the soft breezes off the moist prairies! How weird, how very near, the crimson and green and black and yellow sunsets! How dream-like the land and the great, whispering river! The profound stillness and breath reminded the old German, so he said, of that early time when the evenings and mornings were the first days of the half-built world. The barking of a dog in Fort Plaquemines seemed to come before its turn in the panorama of creation—before ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives, whom ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... heavy, difficult to breathe, and surcharged with electricity; and to Drake, intimately acquainted as he was with these seas, it seemed that a typhoon was more than probably brewing. There was a sense of discomfort and uneasiness in the atmosphere which communicated itself to man and beast, for in the stillness of the night, in the pauses in the singing and uproar, the horses in their stalls on board the transports could be heard whinnying and neighing, as though not altogether at ease. Little balls of electricity came and went ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... Brief but yet endless; From Heaven, eyes behold you In eternity's stillness. There all is fullness, Ye brave to reward you; Work and ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... imprisoned steam at intervals of a half minute or more threw the mud in small fig-like masses from five to forty feet in air with a dull, booming sound, sometimes loud enough to be heard for miles through the awful stillness of these lonely hills. It is clear, from the fact of our finding these mud-patches at least one hundred yards from the crater, that at times much more violent explosions take place. The constant plastering of the slopes of the crater which these explosions cause tends to seal up its vent, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... noise behind me, and turning suddenly saw the flapping white tail of a rabbit vanishing up the slope. I jumped to my feet. The apparition of this grotesque, half-bestial creature had suddenly populated the stillness of the afternoon for me. I looked around me rather nervously, and regretted that I was unarmed. Then I thought that the man I had just seen had been clothed in bluish cloth, had not been naked as a savage would have been; and I tried to persuade ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... stood there dreaming, he suddenly became conscious of sounds in the room overhead. Or rather in the now absolute stillness of the rest of the house he realized that the movements and voices above him, which had really been going on since he entered his room, persisted when ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... where he contrived all sorts of wonderful things, devoting more time to them than to his legitimate lessons, which his soul abhorred. But though she was invariably cheerful, ever ready to share and sympathise with all the varied interests of the house, there was a stillness of manner, a 'dreamy far-offness,' as Mina expressed it, which indicated that sometimes ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... canal, and the troops, on their line of march, enlivened much the scene. Bruges, formerly the grand mart and emporium of the commerce of the East, not only for the Low Countries, but for all the North of Europe, seems, if we may judge from the state of the buildings and the stillness that prevails, to be also in a state of decline. We however had only time to visit the Hotel de Ville and to remark the immense height of the steeple on the Grande Place. We observed a number of pretty women in the streets and in the shops employed in lace making. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... hushed and dim beyond the fringe; whispering leaves and crackling twigs sounded sharp as a shower of stones in the stillness. Great trees reared their majestic heads to mingle their foliage and shut out the light; every creeping, flying, walking creature seemed awed into a vague murmuring that was deeper than silence. The Grove of Mysteries was a semicircular space of ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... letter unfolded, and a tress of shining hair dropped on the old man's hand, clinging lovingly, as it were, about his fingers, while a low, deep cry broke the stillness of the room. He knew it in a moment—knew it was Fannie's hair—the same he had so oft caressed when she was but a little girl and he a grown-up man. It was Fannie's hair, come to him over land and sea, and his eyes grew dim with tears, which rained over his thin, dark face ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... for them, speaking to the elder, whom she had not yet seen, as if they were already acquainted. There was moreover in the air of that personage at this juncture little to invite such a confidence: he appeared to have been startled, in the oddest manner, into stillness and, holding out no hand to meet her, only stared rather stiffly and without a smile. An observer disposed to interpret the scene might have fancied him a trifle put off by the girl's familiarity, or even, as by a singular effect of her self-possession, stricken into deeper diffidence. ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... the end those three Shall perish and their hands be still, And with the master's touch shall flee Their incommunicable skill. A stillness absolute as death Along the slacking wheels shall lie, And, flagging at a single breath, The fires shall moulder out and die. The roar shall vanish at its height, And over that tremendous town The silence of eternal night Shall gather close and settle down. All its grim grandeur, tower and hall, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... Again a stillness ensued. Mehetabel could hear her heart beat. She could hear no other sound. She looked through the room towards the clock. It ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... down the parlor. Then, the drip,—drip,—was broken by longer blanks, and stopped. The cotton wood leaves ceased to rustle and flutter. Only the twang of the night hawk's wing hummed through the stillness; and the distracted tread no longer paced the Mission Parlor. When Eleanor came back from across the hall, she shut the Library ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... forest districts; for nothing contributes so much to bring forth the loving principle of the affections as the silent melancholy of the umbrageous woods, and the soft and perfumed breezes that pervade them. Here, in the dusk and stillness of the summer evenings, these wood-nymphs hear in the lofty branches of the linden, the endearing love songs of the feathered tribe, and when night throws its charitable gloom over their blushing cheeks, they whisper at the trysting place what they have heard ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Maitland, the daughter of Lady Rothes (they were the nearest neighbours of the Stair family in Wigtownshire), and I afterwards heard the tradition from others in that country. It was to the following effect, that when, after the noise and violent screaming in the bridal chamber, comparative stillness succeeded, and the door was forced, the window was found open, and it was supposed by many that the lover (Lord Rutherford) had, by the connivance of some of the servants, found means, during the bustle of the marriage feast, to ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... again, and we took a last look at El-Kerak. The moon was beginning to rise above the rim of the Moab Hills. The land beyond the Dead Sea was wrapped in utter silence. Over to the south-east you could make out one dot of yellow light, to prove that men lived and moved and had their being in that stillness. Otherwise, you couldn't believe it was real country. It looked like a vision of the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... he could hear, in the mild December stillness, his horse's feet coming and going on the gravel. Her horse, led up and down by her servant, at the door of her house!... The sound symbolized his whole future...the situation his marriage had made for him, and to which he must henceforth bend, unless he broke with it then and there.... ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... mocking; callow and alien youth, having to be looked after and studied and taught, as though nothing but it mattered, term after term—and now, all of a sudden, in mid-term, peace, ataraxy, a profound and leisured stillness. No lectures to deliver to-morrow; no "essays" to hear and criticise; time for the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the village takes its name, are suffered to stand, unscathed by the woodman's axe. The "iron horse" has never disturbed the inhabitants by his shrill voice, and the rattling of cars has not broken upon the stillness of a summer-day. The village is not on the direct route from any of the principal cities to others, consequently the inhabitants suffer little apprehension of having their fine farms cut up by rail-road tracks. The ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... dipped down to a low marshy place, where a stream soaked through the path. The rock, which seemed like a little pinnacle, rose sharply on their left clear of the bushes: all else was forest, except that a little path or clearing led up to the left, among the trees. There was an utter stillness in the air, which was all full of a golden light. The swords came merrily out of the scabbards with a sudden clang. The troopers closed in about them; but then, with a sudden dark rush out of the wood, ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hatchways, and gathering their firemen at quarters. But they would not withdraw their ships a single yard! At ten o'clock the great French ship blew up with a flame that for a moment lit shore and sea, and a sound that hushed into stillness the whole tumult of the battle. Out of a crew of over a thousand men only seventy were saved! For ten minutes after that dreadful sight the warring fleets seemed stupefied. Not a shout was heard, not a shot fired. Then the French ship next the missing flagship broke into wrathful fire, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... with satisfaction, "I was about to ask you what you thought the distance was. Two miles is about what I had estimated. We can't say very exactly, for sound is likely to travel far in this still air. But let us make a liberal allowance for the stillness. I think we are safe in saying that the sound comes from a point not more than four miles distant from this island. Now, the next question is, from what direction does ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... been constructed beneath it for the accommodation of the foot-traveler, or, perchance, some idle dreamer like myself. It seemed to look round with a lordly air upon its old hereditary domain, whose stillness was no longer broken by the tap of the martial drum, nor the discordant clang of arms; and, as the breeze whispered among its branches, it seemed to be holding friendly colloquies with a few of its venerable contemporaries, who ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... berth with an armful of pistols and something of a heavy heart, and set open the window where I was to watch. It was a small part of the deck that I could overlook, but enough for our purpose. The sea had gone down, and the wind was steady and kept the sails quiet; so that there was a great stillness on the ship, in which I made sure I heard the sound of muttering voices. A little after, and there came a clash of steel upon the deck, by which I knew they were dealing out the cutlasses, and one had been let fall; and after ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... force a theory fitted for poetry on sculpture and architecture would rob these of their distinctive aesthetic values; in the one case, of the plastic beauty of finely moulded marble surfaces as realized by imaginative excursions of the hand; and in the other case, of the perfect stillness and stability which give to great structures their ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... succeeded the happening of these events; but it was as the solemn stillness which precedes the eruption of an earthquake, when a volcanic explosion has given notice of its approach;—rendered more awful by the uncertainty where its desolating influence would be felt. It was however, a stillness ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... beating our clothes white on stones in the tank. In the village the women are grinding corn; the oxen are drawing water from the well. The wood-smoke hangs in wisps on the hot air, and the song of the boys bringing home the cattle comes to me distinctly in the stillness. The sunset colours are fading into the deep blue of the Indian night, and the faithful are ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... almost count the stones. In front of us, between these two enormous headlands, lay the sea as calm as when the Madonna stayed the tempest, and all along the great curve of the shore little waves were lazily playing in the morning stillness. I asked the sceptical guard what part of ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro— And what should they know of England who only England know?— The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... the many-hued marble floors; and, as she passed, a vase of great white lilies caught in her draperies of cramoisie and fell. She gave no heed, but swept on, and faced him in the sunny silence. Across the pause the Angelus sounded from a church hard by: Hilarius crossed himself devoutly; and the stillness fled before a ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... apparent, from the above accounts of the experiences of each vessel, that the failure of the greater part of the fleet to pass was principally due to other circumstances than the Confederate fire. The darkness of the night, the stillness of the air, which permitted the smoke to settle undisturbed, the intricacy of the navigation, the rapidity of the current, then running at the rate of five knots, the poor speed of the ships, not over ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it would have sufficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her house while she was out, to wait there until that hour of her return, into whose stillness and peace would flow, to be mingled and lost there, all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed spell had made him imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she would not; he must return home; ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... thus engaged, standing on a bridge which carried a by-road over the stream, a shock passed through him: the stillness was broken as by thunder, the vision fled, and the entanglements fell over him like a gladiator's net. A motor, coming round a dangerous bend, had just missed him; and he stood covered with dust. Chandrapal saw and ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... The stillness became more impressive from a sound which blended with, rather than broke into it; a low monotone, like the sweeping of the wind over the strings of some rude instrument of music, issued from the lips of the Pawnee. ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... gown, white muslin neckerchief and cap, after that exquisitely neat and quaint fashion. Then the Hutchinsons sang a hymn, in which all were requested to join. Afterward Mrs. Stanton came to the front of the pulpit, the house was hushed, to a reverential stillness, and I never yet heard anything so solemn and impressive as her reading of the Declaration of Rights of the Women of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... hour passed with nothing to indicate the reason for these most peculiar actions. Half an hour that was interminable to Mr. Weil, torn with a thousand fears as to what it might all portend. At last, however, a faint sound broke the stillness. Some one was approaching. Roseleaf touched the shoulder of his companion to indicate the ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... not there. But something was there, by the porcelain basin—something which might have sent me scurrying upstairs two steps at a time, but which as a matter of fact held me to the spot. My heart seemed to stand still—so still! And in the stillness I remember setting down the brass candlestick on a tall nest ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... stillness reigned around me—at least, so it appeared to me as compared with the violent internal emotion which I had been experiencing; but by and by I began to distinguish various sounds. Basil brought something downstairs which he laid upon a chest outside. ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... silently thinking of Poppy, not quite free from the fear that she might have followed him to New Zealand by another boat. The idea made him nervous, and the suspense became unendurable. He took up his cap and strolled out into the stillness of the evening. Sea-bridge seemed strange to him after his long absence, and, under present conditions, melancholy. There was hardly a soul to be seen, but a murmur of voices came through the open windows of the Thorn, and a clumsy cart jolted and creaked ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... against the window-panes, the gale whistled mournfully among the stunted trees, but within this room not a sound stirred the deadly stillness of the air, and yet at this moment hatred and love, savage lust and sublime self-abnegation—the most power full passions the heart of man can know—held three men here enchained; each a slave to his dominant passion, each ready to stake ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... now was closed; a serene stillness reigned; and the chaste Queen of Night with her silver crescent faintly illuminated the hemisphere. The mind of Montraville was hushed into composure by the serenity of the surrounding objects. "I will think on her no more," ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... his joke and making another echo ring sharply over the still face of the water, the red man strode off through the gap fifty yards distant. Then in the stillness Mark heard the purr of a machine. He had evidently departed upon a motor bicycle to the main road half a ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... look for me, now I was not there? I waited, and a strange, unearthly tremor shook both blood and nerves, until tears were wrought out, and came dropping down, and in the stillness I heard one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... my study, my head bent, and my hands loosely clasped in my lap, living it over and over again. Out of doors, the soft gray dusk had hushed the tired world in its arms. Within, the stillness of night had settled down upon the room. By and by the moon rose above the great waters of the lake, and on shore the trees were casting silent, solemn shadows, made visible by the soft, hazy light that lay between them. Once in a while ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... amongst the minor works must I omit to notice Miss Stuart-Wortley's view on the river Cherwell, taken from the walks of Magdalen College, Oxford,—a little picture marked by great sympathy for the shade and coolness of green places and for the stillness of summer waters; or Mrs. Valentine Bromley's Misty Day, remarkable for the excellent drawing of a breaking wave, as well as for a great delicacy of tone. Besides the Marchioness of Waterford, whose brilliant ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... sound, only a rush of wind from the valley below. Everything lapsed again into its awful stillness. As the cloud lifted from where the mill had stood, the moon shone only upon empty space. There was a singular murmuring and whispering from the woods beyond that increased in sound, and an hour later the dry bed of the old mill-stream was filled ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... they thought they heard distant sounds, these might be caused by the passage of a wild animal through the bushes. The sentries were all vigilant. It was the first time that the Sussex lads had been in face of an enemy, and the stillness of the night, the sombre forest in front of them, and the possibility of a savage and unknown foe lurking there, kept them thoroughly on the alert. Once or twice Wulf and Osgod went forward to examine some bush that had seemed to the imagination ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... darker; in the west still lingered the last sunset hues of pink and saffron and green; and overhead in the deep blackening blue of night the stars were just becoming visible. We had strolled on in silence for some time, hushed by the solemn stillness of the evening. At last Dr. Armitage exclaimed, "Ah, Isabel, how I sometimes long for rest and peace, and sweet wholesome surroundings! How beautiful life might be passed with a companion such as you. The earth is beautiful, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... described, varying from grandeur to tameness, from fertility to barrenness, from extreme beauty to extreme ugliness, but always possessing, at least, the recommendation of being new, the wanderers in the Bush are delighted to range. There is a charm to enterprising spirits in the freedom, the stillness, and even in the dangers and privations, of these vast wilds, which, to such spirits, scenes of a more civilised character can never possess. If it be true,—and who has never felt ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... to have possessed them both, for with very few words they left the boat and took their places, and with no words at all for some time the hooks were baited and the lines thrown. Profound stillness — and then the flutter of a poor little fish as he struggled out of his element, or the stir made by one of the fishers in reaching after the bait-basket — and then all was still again. The lines drooped motionless in the water; the eyes of the fishers wandered off ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... glittering stars were spread thick; the brilliant moon poured down its silver light over the whiteness of the sloping roof-tops, and upon the ghostly white, silently drooping trees. A heaviness hung in the frosty air—a stillness broken only by the tinkling of sleigh-bells or sometimes by the ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... of the stillness of the moonlit world and the insane intrusion of the war into it has not, I think, been suggested so expressively ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... while, Juliette had neither moved nor uttered a sound. Little more than a minuted had elapsed since the moment when the first peremptory order, to open in the name of the Republic, had sounded like the tocsin through the stillness of the house. Droulde's kisses were still hot upon her hand, his words of love were still ringing in ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and the horses stretched their stiff limbs into a feeble lumbering gallop. Ezra and the sergeant shot to the front, and the others followed as best they might. Suddenly in the stillness they heard far away a dull rattling sound like the clatter of distant castanets. "It's their horses' hoofs!" cried Ezra; and the troopers behind raised a cheer to show that they too understood ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... between us and either sky or earth. This is a new and somewhat larger bedroom than I have been used to. But with no house within twenty miles we are unmolested. What a place! I listen. "All the air a solemn stillness holds." I look. "So lonesome it is that God himself scarce seems to be there." But the clear air and quiet night soon lull me into unbroken slumber. Thus we travel until we reach Park St. Church Station, where we find our comfortable log house of one room ready to receive us. Though we ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various
... of the boat ceased, and an awful stillness seemed to sink down upon her as she glided into a little creek or bay, which was ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... of the clock are moving. The world seems to be on tiptoe, listening for a thunderstroke of Fate. The Ministers at length sit silent, rigid, almost petrified, looking fixedly at floor or ceiling. Then through the awful stillness of the room and the park outside comes the deep boom of "Big Ben." Boom, boom, boom! No one moves until the last of the eleven strokes has gone reverberating through the night. Then comes a voice, heavy with emotion, yet ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... of heart, his mind reverted to the long future before him that was now so terribly vague and dark. In the consciousness of solitude and in order to break the oppressive stillness, he spoke aloud at intervals between his paroxysms of pain. "After all, what is dying? I know how deeply rooted in the human mind is the belief that it is only a departure to another place and a different condition of life. Can a conviction ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... it, lifted the bar, threw open the door and they went in. George Fennell was lying on the straw upon the floor. He had raised himself on one elbow, and was looking apprehensively to see what the opening of the door would reveal as the cause of this interruption to the usually sepulchral stillness of the jail. Reuben was standing in the middle of the floor, eagerly gazing in the same direction. Perez sprang to his brother's side, his face beautiful with the joy of the deliverer. If he had been a Frenchman, or an ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... The stillness of the desert night was a thing to wonder at. The silence of the great outdoors, of vast empty space, subdued the restlessness of the cattle. Many a time before the range-rider had felt the fascination of it creep into his blood as he had ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... day do I become the envied bride of PETER, justly surnamed PARAGON; and much I wonder what in me he found (he, who Perfection so personifies) that he could condescend an eye to cast on faulty, feather-headed EMILY! How solemn is the stillness all around me! (A loud bang is heard behind screen.) Methought I heard the dropping of a pin!—perhaps I should arise and search for it.... Yet why, on second thoughts, disturb myself, since I am, by my settlements, to have a handsome sum allowed for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... letter in his hand. Then without a sign, Lady Cicely passes out. There is a great stillness in the house. Mrs. Harding has watched Lady Cicely and Sir John in amazement. Sir John has sunk into a chair. She breaks out, "John, for God's sake what does it mean—this woman—speak—there is something awful, I ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... of the victim's brother, when after a time he dared to look on this revolting punishment. Save an ill-repressed sob, or half-muttered interjection from the suffering man, no other sound broke the stillness of the place, where a thousand horsemen stood in close order, but the sputtering of the torches, in the red light of which our breaths were ascending like steam. Yes! there was one other sound, and it was a horrible one—the monotonous ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Private Bain, lulled to a sense of false security by the stillness of the night, had opened his eyes, which had been closed for purposes of philosophic reflection, to find himself surrounded by four ghostly figures in greatcoats. With creditable presence of mind he jerked his alarm-cord. But, alas! the cord came ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... then goodbye to form and desk And sudden floods of noise When fifteen minutes' fun and frisk Make happy girls and boys. As shrill as swifts in upper air Was our young shrillness: 'Twas joy of life, 'twas strength to fare Broke the morning stillness. ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... in the full glow of the setting beams of our imperial joy and chant out our farewell, and quite another to live alone in the darkness. For a little while memory may support us, but memory grows faint. On every side is the thick, cheerless pall and that stillness through which no sound comes. We are alone, quite alone, cut off from the fellowship of the day, unseeing and unseen. More especially is this so when the dungeon is of our own making, and we ourselves have shot its bolts. There is a natural night that comes to all, and in its unwavering course swallows ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... he liked to have his models under his hand. Presently, after loud yawning, the natives went away to sleep, and Strickland and I were left alone. I cannot describe to you the intense silence of the night. On my island in the Paumotus there is never at night the complete stillness that there was here. There is the rustle of the myriad animals on the beach, all the little shelled things that crawl about ceaselessly, and there is the noisy scurrying of the land-crabs. Now and then in the lagoon you hear the leaping of a fish, and sometimes a ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... of dreadful black and dazzling silver, the stillness that was yet indescribably electric, the unreality that was allegorically real, she felt it all as a vague accompaniment to the heartache that never left her—the scornful mockery of the goddess she ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... this was one of the few spots on the wide earth to which he could say farewell with regret. "Thy majestic hills have impressed themselves upon my soul, as a seal upon wax. The quiet beauty of thy lake shall be to me forever an image of peace and purity and stillness, and that inscription in thy little churchyard, a sentence of wisdom ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... The stillness of the atmosphere I had noticed when I quitted the deck to summon the skipper, had been succeeded by a series of light puzzling puffs of air; while, although the night was clear, with a few stars shining overhead, fleecy fragments of cloud were whirling about in eddies, some settling in ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... strong in flight, And years rolled swiftly by; And Autumn's falling leaves proclaimed This good old man must die! He laid him down right tranquilly, Gave up life's latest sigh; And mournful stillness reigned around, And tears bedewed each eye, For this fine old English gentleman All of the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... having thanked the Creator of all for his never-failing mercy, I closed my eyes, and was passing away into the world of dreaming existence, when suddenly there burst on my soul the serenade of the Rosebreasted bird, so rich, so mellow, so loud in the stillness of the night, that sleep fled from my eyelids. Never did I enjoy music more: it thrilled through my heart, and surrounded me with an atmosphere of bliss. One might easily have imagined that even the Owl, charmed by such delightful music, remained reverently silent. ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... reached the end of my 'beat', and had stopped to relight my pipe, when drama broke loose with the swift unexpectedness which was characteristic of the place. The stillness of the night was split by a sound which I could have heard in a gale and recognized among a hundred conflicting noises. It was a scream, a shrill, piercing squeal that did not rise to a crescendo, but started at its maximum ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... broke the stillness but the "click, click" of the sharp knives, at the touch of which the tall grass quivered ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... of this hat," said Sam Holly, meditatively. He had taken the hat from Hackett's head and was holding it in his hand, looking dubiously around at the shadows beyond the firelight where now absolute stillness reigned. "What do you ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry |
